Now Available: Making Waves, The Continuing Portuguese Adventure

Buy through Pay Pal on Vehicule's site, or at better bookstores

The Walkable City Keeps on Going: New Review in the Canadian Literature

"Soderstrom would readily admit that her general argument in favour of pedestrian-friendly communities is not a new one: walkability is a firmly established principle of sustainability-oriented planning. However, the book serves as a fine, up-to-date introduction to this still-pertinent issue. Soderstrom’s judiciously selective overview of the history of walking and its changing place in urban life (from Roman settlements to nineteenth-century Paris to post-war North American suburbs to newer master-planned communities in Brazil and Singapore) makes engaging, informative reading for the generalist or readers new to the topic."Maia Joseph in Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticsm and Review.

The Walkable City Gets Praise from Urbanist Christopher Leinberger

"Mary Soderstrom's The Walkable City addresses one of the most important environmental, economic, social, public health and foreign policy issues of our day that is also the most unexpected and simplest; building walkable urban places. Using an approach I personally enjoy, taking a long historical perspective from pre-history through the various ages of city building, Ms. Soderstrom demonstrates that we as a civilization know how to build walkable cities. We just have to speed up our efforts."Christopher Leinberger, The Brookings Institution

The Walkable City: Haussmann's Boulevards to Jane Jacobs Street

Now available from independent booksellers and on Amazon.ca. Véhicule Press. ISBN: 978-1-55065-243-7

The Violets of Usambara, Mary Soderstrom's New Novel

Bloggers Like The Violets of Usambara

More about The Violets of Usambara

Kim Barry Brunhuber seems to like The Violets of Usambara a lot: his review "These diamonds are a girl's worst enemy" appeared in The Globe and Mail Saturday, June 14, 2008. He says "the novel is a wonderfully matter-of-fact portrayal of two pragmatic characters struggling to find themselves and reconnect with each other." Check it out.

The book is available at independent bookstores and Chapters/Indigo stores throughout Canada and online through Amazon.ca, which will ship to the US.

Gardening in Quebec from a Brazilian Perspective

Loaded Web

Copyright notice

All text and photos in this blog are the work of Mary Soderstrom unless otherwise indicated, and so are copyright in her name under Canadian copyright laws. Please have the courtesy to ask before you reproduce.

Wednesday, 5 March 2014

Edith Laperle: Wouldn't It Be Great If the Third Time Was the Charm!

Well, the Quebec general election is definitely going to be held April 7, 2014. Given the Parti Québécois's attempts to appeal to the most enthocentric part of the electorate, hopes aren't high for a good campaign. The leaders of the other two parties, Philippe Couillard of the Liberals and François Legault of the inelegantly named Coalition pour l'avenir du Québec, CAQ--certainly don't promise to raise the tone.

But Québec Solidaire, the left-wing, strongly principled fourth party, has some excellent candidates. Edith Laperle is one of them. A trade unionist, she'll be running for the third time in the Outremont riding which also include the less toney neighborhoods of Mile End and Côte des Neiges. She got 32 per cent of the vote last fall when Couillard ran in a bye-election, which was a terrific result.

Couillard isn't running in Outremont this time, since he promised to run in the Northern Quebec riding of Roberval during his campaign for the Liberal leadership: the Outremont foray was designed to give him a safe seat after he became leader. He probably should be congratulated on not going back on that promise in order to stay in Outremont, but the fact that he made it in the first place says worlds about his frequently shakey political judgment.

Not that the Liberals aren't aware of the appeal of QS and Ms. Laperle among Outremont voters. It looks like they want to muddy the ideological waters since they're running the sister of Françoise David, the QS co-spokesman and one of two QS members of the National Assembly. As in many political families --think Bob Ray and his brother John during the former's NDP phase, and Daniel and Pierre-Marc Johnson, respectively Liberal and PQ premiers of Quebec--families can see deep divisions.

What will be interesting to watch is how Ms. Laperle, whose face and ideas are now pretty well known in the riding, approaches the campaign. Does she have a chance to win? I'd love to think so.

1 comment:

I certainly hope so. Couillard is running quite a risk by deciding stand in Roberval. While Lac St-Jean is not as historically as conservative as the St-Maurice region (think Duplessis, and later Hérouxville) it is a remote rural region in mid-northern Québec where there are very few people who are not "pure-laine" francophones, except for the Indigenous Innu people. In many countries, appeals to fear of outsiders and the unknown get more of an echo where there are few "foreigners".

I wouldn't have voted Liberal anyway (I'm a founding member of QS - attended their founding conference at Université de Montréal, in that very riding) but I'm deeply disappointed by Couillard's nasty opening salvo about how much he "detests" the current government. I always thought he was trying to portray himself as an educated gentleman; he came off as a blustering bully.